On her May 11, 2026 broadcast, Rachel Maddow said, 'Eighteen patients from that Hantavirus-stricken cruise ship have been brought back to the United States now.' This checks out. An outbreak of Andes virus, a type of hantavirus, struck the cruise ship M/V Hondius in the Atlantic, and health authorities confirmed it [3]. On the morning of the broadcast, a flight carrying 18 people from the ship, 17 U.S. citizens and one British national living in the United States, landed in Omaha, Nebraska for evaluation at a specialized quarantine unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center [4]. The CDC confirmed the same total of 18 [1][2]. We considered a lower rating, because the CDC called these people 'potentially exposed' rather than patients, and later confirmed that none of them developed hantavirus disease in the United States [1]. We rate the claim true because a patient is a person under medical care, which these 18 were: admitted to a hospital quarantine unit and monitored by medical staff. The word does not require a person to be sick. Verdict: TRUE.